This specification relates to wireless control of electrical loads.
Energy providers, (e.g., utilities and utility commissions) are pursuing public and technology policies that will allow them to “smooth” energy consumption over peak usage periods. By efficiently managing energy usage, the energy providers can avoid the need to build new power stations and distribution infrastructure, resulting in significant cost savings and energy conservation.
Two focus areas in which energy management is experiencing penetration are the residential environment and the commercial environment. For the residential environment, wireless smart meters are used, and allow the energy providers to send demand response events (e.g., commands that adjust the load in the residential environment) and pricing signals (e.g., a unit price per kilowatt hour is now doubling) to encourage load shedding during peak load conditions. For the commercial environment, protocols such as OpenADR are being used to allow utilities to connect into the commercial building to provide similar information.
However, there are many commercial and public environments for which satisfactory energy management networks have not been developed. For example, an entity such as a chain of several dozen restaurants located in several states may desire to have the power consumption of its locations managed intelligently. However, OpenADR (and other technologies using the Internet for the communication interface between the utility and the entity locations) is a technology that assumes that the building has a building control system that can take the OpenADR signals and convert them into commands to controllers of controlled devices within the location. Many of the commercial and public entities, however, do not have systems deployed that can facilitate such control. Furthermore, while Internet access is now widespread, access for many small commercial entity locations may be limited or non-existent. Smart meters, on the other hand, are primarily targeted at residential environments, and products designed to interact with smart meters are typically residential-class products not suitable for the commercial setting. Accordingly, solutions that target the residential market do not properly address the needs of the commercial and public entity environment, and current solutions that target the commercial and public entity environment are not well suited for the resident market.